


In the Skin

by VagrantWriter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:20:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26995810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VagrantWriter/pseuds/VagrantWriter
Summary: Ramsay meets his match.
Relationships: Ramsay Bolton/Theon Greyjoy
Comments: 23
Kudos: 41





	In the Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Forgive me the lack of Halloween fic last year. Here's something macabre for the season. Mind the tags. ;)

Ramsay knows pain.

Perhaps more than anything, he knows pain. What it feels like, how to inflict it on others, how much of it a body can take.

But in this moment, as he rises into consciousness, he only knows two things.

1.) There is a burlap sack over his head.

2.) He is tied to a saltire.

There is familiar discomfort in both things. (Ramsay knows the difference between discomfort and pain.) There’s the rancid-sweet smell of his breath against the dampened fabric. It’s rough on his cheek, chafing. And there’s the ache of his arms from being tied in such an unnatural position. One does not become a Bolton by being unfamiliar with these things.

What bothers him is what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where he is, or why, or who has brought him here. Or what happened before.

It’s almost like he was born in this moment, with no memories and no past. But that can’t be right. He’s Ramsay Bolton, son of Roose Bolton, heir to the Dreadfort and Winterfell and future Warden of the North. He knows that much.

He can’t see, but he can hear. There’s water dripping off of stones. A dungeon, then.

No sooner does he suppose this then the crack of a whip rings out, followed by an agonized scream. Both echo off the walls as if they happened instanteously of each other.

Ramsay tastes copper at the back of his throat. His head is pounding. The whip cracks again and the man screams again, and Ramsay grits his teeth. He’s trying to _think_ , dammit. There are flashes of images—blood on the snow, the ringing of steel on steel—but every time something begins to coalesce, there’s another wail of agony.

Eventually Ramsay gives up. He slips back into unconsciousness to the sound of screaming.

***

He dreams. He knows he’s dreaming.

There’s a vast field, flat and snowy. It’s littered with corpses. Men in armor and their tattered banners. In the distance, far away, Ramsay thinks he can make out the shapes of trees, barren and with their limbs waving in the wind.

Except there is no wind here.

Perhaps they are not trees after all.

A shiver runs down his spine. And _then_ the cold gust comes, and there’s a voice.

_I want him to think about me._

***

Ramsay wakes up again to the sound of approaching feet.

There’s a clarity to his thoughts now. He remembers a battle. A battle he had been in. And now he’s here, in a place that is clearly a dungeon. He must have been captured, though he doesn’t remember that. The pain in his head is still there. He must have been knocked unconscious.

He is tied to the saltire for the irony of it, he supposes, and almost laughs. Whoever has captured him means to use his own House’s methods against him? Let them try their best.

They haven’t learned from Roose Bolton himself. Ramsay had known _of_ pain when he first came to live at the Dreadfort. But he’d not _known_ pain until Roose had seen fit to teach him House Bolton’s traditions.

_“Where is the seat of pain, boy?”_

_“The skin?”_ Ramsay had offered. It had been a good guess.

_“The mind,”_ Roose corrected. _“Done properly, your knife only needs to do half the work. Your victim’s mind will take care of the rest.”_

And then Roose had showed him how.

The footsteps are closer now, and the bag is ripped from Ramsay’s head. He blinks. The room is not bright, but his eyes are sensitive to the light. It takes him a moment to focus on the man standing in front of him.

The man looks just like him.

Ramsay squints. His head hurts.

“I can tell by the look on your face,” the man says with a voice that sounds just like Ramsay’s, and a smile that looks just like Ramsay’s, “that you weren’t expecting me, _m’lord_.”

“Ungh,” Ramsay says. His voice is not working.

Also, his eyes are not working, it seems.

“I’m curious what you _were_ expecting,” the doppelganger says. “You _knew_ you had no hopes of holding Winterfell by yourself, didn’t you?”

Hold Winterfell? There was a battle, wasn’t there? There were bodies in the snow. Or had that been a dream? Is he dreaming now? It doesn’t _feel_ like a dream.

“Who…?” he finally manages to get out.

It sounds like a kitten’s mewling, but his doppelganger seems to understand. “Oh, I suppose we haven’t been formally introduced.” He places a hand on his chest. “You know Roose Bolton, of course. Well, I am Ramsay, the only _living_ son of Roose Bolton.”

No, he isn’t. He’s lying. The fucker.

Ramsay tries to say so, but his thoughts and vision are swimming in two separate directions.

His head lolls forward, and then there are hands on his face, forcing him upright, to look into his doppelganger’s eyes. And it’s very much like looking into a mirror, and if this is some sort of trick on his captors’ part, it’s disturbingly thorough one.

“Stay with me now,” the man says using Ramsay’s own voice, his own inflection even, with just a hint of a threat there. “I’m going to teach you about pain.”

***

Ramsay is on the snowy field again.

He looks down at his hands. His fingers are intact. But they sting with phantom pain as he flexes them.

He looks out at the field. The bodies are still there. Crows have begun to alight.

There is something else moving among the piles of dead men. Something larger than a crow. Ramsay shields his eyes against the glare off the snow, but he can’t quite make it out. He takes a step closer, and he sees it’s a person. A man, perhaps, though Ramsay can’t tell because they are wearing a hooded cloak. But it is most definitely a living person.

“You!” Ramsay calls out, but the figure either does not hear or else chooses to ignore him.

Ramsay does not like to be ignored.

He begins forward. The snow is a red slush, and slippery. “You there!” His voice carries across the field. “What happened here?”

The figure continues walking.

Ramsay is among the bodies now. They do not look as though they’ve been dead long—they are not frozen through yet, barely grey, though he sees fingernails and noses that have been turned black by the frost. The blood is still warm enough to flow. The battle happened recently. Ramsay wonders who won and where the survivors are. Perhaps the figure he is following is the only one.

His footsteps are heavy. He realizes he is wearing his armor—the suit made to look like a flayed body. It’s heavy. Ramsay is not used to wearing it.

“Hey!” he calls out again. The figure is closer now. It’s walking oddly. Lurching, Ramsay thinks. The man is wounded. Ramsay’s close now. Close enough that if he sprinted, he could grab hold of the stranger and whirl him around. “Stop! Your lord commands it!”

At that, the figure does stop. The cloak falls limp and heavy over the shape underneath. It’s a slight shape, but Ramsay still can’t make out who’s underneath there.

And suddenly, he doesn’t want to. He stops moving too. He doesn’t want to get any closer to the figure. He doesn’t want to see what’s inside that hood. Because he has the oddest sensation that it’s not a man at all, but rather something filling the cloak in the vague shape of a man.

A crow caws.

The figure starts to turn, and Ramsay’s heart seizes. “Who are you?” he asks. He demands.

He doesn’t want to know.

_I want him to feel it and think about me._

***

Ramsay jerks awake.

His hands are on fire. He can’t move them, because his wrists are still bound to the saltire. It’s just the one finger, he knows, that’s been flayed. But he feels it everywhere.

He remembers the first time Roose took the flaying knife to him, to “teach him about pain.” How it was white-hot, like a heated poker. How he writhed and screamed, despite himself. It takes skin a long time to grow back. He knows the skin on his finger will never grow back. It will need to be amputated. He’s never had a finger amputated before, but he wants it, desperately. He would beg for it.

Ramsay sags against the saltire. His head still hurts. And his stomach. And the need to drink is almost as overwhelming as the need to cut off his ruined fingers.

He tries to remember the last time he was so abjectly miserable. He can conjure a few times, where he had been helpless, powerless, confused. But nothing like this. Nothing so…

If he could just know where he is, and who this doppelganger is…

If he could just remember…

He doesn’t fall asleep so much as plummet back into unconsciousness when his body and mind can’t handle the uncertainty anymore.

***

He’s back where he was before. In the exact spot. Looking at the cloaked stranger. He can see a face now. A skeletally thin hand pulls away the hood to reveal it’s only Reek. Ramsay hasn’t seen him since he ran off with his bride. He looks even more like an old man than Ramsay remembers, face sunken, lips curled inwards around missing teeth. His hair is white.

“Reek.” Ramsay takes a step forward. The fear from earlier is gone. Laughable in hindsight. It’s only Reek. “Where have you been? I’ve been—” He stops himself short, realizes there’s something thick in his throat and it’s making him sound…not how he wants to come across. “My men have been out _looking_ for you, Reek,” he says, schooling himself. “You didn’t think you could _hide_ from me, did you?”

Reek looks at him impassively and doesn’t move. “Ramsay Snow,” he says. And it’s definitely Reek’s voice. But also not.

Ramsay stops in his tracks. Again. “What did you just call me?”

Reek’s eyes are heavily lidded. “I am speaking with Ramsay Snow, the Bastard of Bolton.” It seems almost like a question. But also not.

“You forget your place.” Ramsay forces a smile, while his hands clench into fists at his side. “Will I have to remind you what my name is? And yours?”

Reeks scoffs at him.

_Scoffs_.

“Flesh noises for flesh bodies.” Reek turns his head to regard a crow who has alit on a nearby body. He watches it with the same disinterest he’s shown Ramsay. “I’ve no need for them. But _he_ asked for you. And so here you are.”

“What are you talking about?” Ramsay demands. “Reek, have you lost your mind?” That must be it. Wandering around in the snow for weeks. He’s lost what senses he had left.

“Reek,” Reek says, as if he’s never heard the word before, let alone said it. “That’s your flesh noise for this one. He told me to wear this flesh, when we met. It’s my favor to him, that you would think of him.”

Ramsay takes an unthinking step back. There’s a swell of fear again, doubly laughable this time because he _knows_ it’s just Reek. Reek, who isn’t even a man…

And Ramsay understands in that instant that the thing standing before him _isn’t_ a man. 

“Who are you?”

“I have a flesh noise humans call me, but you are asking the wrong question…Ramsay Snow.”

“No, that’s not—that’s not my name.” Ramsay wants to take another step back, but finds he can’t. “That’s not my name!”

***

“Don’t worry,” Ramsay’s voice says, but Ramsay isn’t aware of having spoken. “We’ll _teach_ you your name.”

Ramsay blinks blearily into consciousness. His flayed finger is gone, and now he’s being pulled down from the saltire.

It’s not just his doppelganger this time. There’s another familiar face. Several, in fact.

“Allow me to introduce you to Damon Dance-for-Me,” the doppelganger says, and gestures, “and Skinner and Sour Alyn.”

Introduce them? They’re _his_ men.

“Damon,” Ramsay hisses, “ _unhand_ me.” But no words come out. Just a pained groaned. “Skinner, Alyn…”

The Boys lay Ramsay out on the cold stones of the floor, press him down.

His doppelganger paces back and forth at his feet. “I hope you enjoyed your few hours of freedom.” He grins, using Ramsay’s own smile, and says, “Remove his breeches.”

“No!” The word does come out, but Ramsay’s voice is so wrecked that he barely recognizes it.

Damon holds Ramsay’s shoulders pinned to the floor, while Skinner takes out a knife. Ramsay kicks out, but it’s weak, and Alyn holds his legs.

_Unhand me, you idiots!_ Ramsay screams in his head. He cannot, _cannot_ get the words out of his mouth, though. They’re building like a pressure in his chest, but they _will_ not come out. _I’m the real Ramsay, me. Not him. He’s an imposter_. _Don’t listen to him._

Skinner begins cutting the breeches from Ramsay’s body, ripping the seams with his blade. Ramsay tries to fight, but his body isn’t obeying. He’s weak from everything, and they only laugh at him.

“D-don’t,” is all Ramsay can get out, and it’s not pleading, it’s _not_. He just can’t get his voice to cooperate.

His breeches are gone, and now he’s completely bare. Alyn and Skinner each grab a knee and force his legs open, and Ramsay blinks and looks up at his doppelganger, because it’s the only thing he can do. This feels familiar. His head is light with déjà vu. His doppelganger has a hooked knife in his hand. A gelding knife.

“Don’t,” Ramsay croaks. He feels tears on his cheeks. He did not give himself permission to cry.

“It seems our previous lesson didn’t rub off,” the doppelganger says. “Luckily, I’m nothing if not patient, and we’ll teach you yet, Reek.”

***

Ramsay is on the snowy field again, but he’s on his knees. His limbs are shaking. His breath comes in ragged bursts, like he’s been fucking.

He stays like that, on his hands and knees in the snow and blood. He feels the phantom pressure of the gelding knife between his legs. One of his hands snakes down to feel. He’s intact. A dream. It was just a dream.

No, this is the dream. He knows that.

The dungeon and the field of bodies. Neither one makes sense. They could both be dreams, he supposes. But then what…?

“Ramsay Snow.”

His head shoots up. The stranger wearing Reek’s face is standing over him. It’s absurd, but the first thing Ramsay notices is that the man— _the thing_ —casts no shadow. And there are no footprints in the snow behind him.

“Please.” Ramsay hasn’t used that word since Roose’s lessons. He knows what a weak and useless word it is. “Are you the one doing this?”

“This?” The stranger looks down at Ramsay, and his eyes _look_ like Reek’s.

“This…whatever is happening.” He pushes himself up to his knees. Bits of snow cling to the gaps in his armor. “Am I dreaming?”

The stranger makes a noncommittal noise.

“Am I drugged? Did you…did _you_ poison me?”

“Me? No.” The stranger’s cloak shifts, and a hand emerges. Knobby, like an old man’s. He sweeps it across the field, indicating the bodies, the blood, the battle. “I tipped Fate’s hand against you on this day, but you alone created _that_.” The stranger’s finger comes to land on a single body, lying on its face in the snow.

Ramsay looks at the body, then at the stranger, then slowly begins crawling towards the body. His legs ache with the memory of having his cock cut off. He’s aware of the stranger’s eyes on him, watching him crawl like a dog. But he gets to the body and knows what he’ll find when he flips it over. He flips it over anyway.

It’s him. Another doppelganger. Those are his eyes, wide open, staring up at him in death. His face, forever set in a pained grimace. He has not been dead long. His intestines are still soft and wet as they pour out of his belly onto the ground. It had not been a quick death.

Ramsay sits there, with his own body cradled in his lap, and feels nothing. Nothing but confusion.

He remembers…he was putting on his armor. There was an army, and he was going to crush them. A false king and his Red Priestess. He was marching out to meet them. A snowy field. Very quiet. The false king’s army standing on the other side.

“You’re beginning to understand.”

Ramsay looks up in surprise. He hadn’t heard the stranger so close behind him.

“Ah,” he says. His voice is very flat. He _does_ understand.

_I want him to feel everything he’s done, and I want him to think about me._

***

“I’m in hell,” Ramsay says as Damon makes bloody strips of his back with the whip. As the Boys take turns raping him—his doppelganger forces him to look into his eyes as he does it. As he loses his teeth and fingers and toes and parts of his flesh.

He remembers dying now, though not specifically the moment when the spear punched through his armor. Rather, he remembers finding himself on the ground, and the way his entrails smoked as they lay on the snow, and the way the battle sounded so far away even as it raged right on top of him. He remembers knowing that was the end, because he’s never once given any weight to the septons and their talk of divine justice. But here he is, having every torture he ever concocted on Reek visited on him.

He realizes he’s reliving Reek’s memories. When he speaks, it’s not what he wants to say and it’s not his voice; it’s Reek’s. When he moves, it’s not how he meant to move. It’s Reek moving him. Their shared body. And that’s the most maddening thing of all. The helplessness of being locked inside Reek’s body, watching through Reek’s eyes, feeling through his skin. But unable to do anything.

It’s funny, in a cosmic way. Ramsay has to laugh, because otherwise he’ll go mad.

He might already _be_ mad.

Because pain is one thing—and it _is_ unbearable—but really it’s the quiet in between. The days they’re left shackled to the wall or tied to the saltire. The constant gnawing hunger that eventually turns to sharp-toothed biting, so that Reek will eat anything they’re given, just to turn it back into gnawing. The thirst that leaves their skin as thin and brittle as paper. The filth that clings to them, itching, festering their wounds.

And being alone in the dark.

Roose once left him shackled, alone, in the dark for three days. Ramsay doesn’t remember why. But he does remember it was the first time he understood what Roose meant by the mind being the seat of pain.

He spends much more than two days alone in the dark now. Time doesn’t have any meaning, but he _knows_ it’s much more than two days. He _feels_ it. He spends much of it sleeping, but he doesn’t dream. Not as such. Not of the snowy field and the cloaked stranger, at least. In these dreams, there’s only more dark, but he can smell something burning. It smells like human flesh. And he can hear voices.

_**What favor would you ask of me**?_ That’s a voice Ramsay doesn’t recognize, but somehow he knows it belongs to whatever was wearing Reek’s face from before.

_Why do I get a favor?_ That’s Reek. The real Reek. Ramsay would stake his mother’s life on it. _Surely I don’t deserve any._

_**Because I deign to** , _the first voice says, condescendingly. It sounds like a young man, but again, Ramsay does not recognize it. ** _It’s your blood you sacrifice. The Red Priestess will get her favor, but I will also give one to you._**

There is a long pause, and the smell of burning flesh grows subtler.

**_Ask what you would_ ,** the other voice prompts.

_Can I see **him** again?_

**_Robb Stark?_** the other voice asks. **_No_**. It offers no explanation.

_Ah, I see_ … There’s an even longer pause. _Then perhaps Jeyne…_

_**Jeyne Poole remains in the land of the flesh. I will not influence the flesh world for you. I cannot.** _

The burning smell is gone now, and it’s only Ramsay in the dark with the two voices.

_In that case, all I want is…_ Reek pauses, but only briefly this time. _I want **him** to feel everything **he’s** done, and I want **him** to think about me._

***

And Ramsay does. He’s forced to. He feels everything he did to Reek, that he had the Boys do to Reek. Every cut and lash, every pincer and prong, outside and in. Every humiliation and subjugation. Every hunger pain. He tastes rat’s blood on his tongue, and how it eases the emptiness in his belly—in _their_ belly. And he thinks about Reek. Where is Reek now? Reek is dead, and Ramsay is also dead, and Ramsay is _here_ , so Reek must also be _some_ where.

Then he remembers what the stranger said and thinks that’s probably the wrong question. The wrong way of thinking about it.

He’s inside Reek when his doppelganger forces him into Greyjoy armor and orders him to retake Moat Cailin. He’s inside Reek when he watches his doppelganger marry Arya Stark, and is made to participate in the bedding afterwards. He’s inside Reek when those wildling cunts plot to steal Arya away from him, and he’s inside Reek when the two of them jump from the battlements.

That’s the last thing he sees: the snow coming up to meet him. Then there’s just white.

He takes a gasping breath, and when he opens his eyes, he’s on the bloody field again.

His body aches, and when he tries to move, it feels like rusted hinges. He can feel the ghost of everything. All of it.

He wraps his arms around himself, the first movement that’s been _his_ in years, and lets out another juddering breath.

“Is that it?” he asks. He doesn’t know to whom.

He hangs his head and lets out a little laugh. Maybe he’s mad after all.

“Is Reek happy now?” He hugs himself tighter. “Has he had his pound of flesh?”

“Flesh has nothing to do with it,” a voice says. Ramsay shudders as he feels lips against his ear, whispering, and not a bit of human warmth to them at all. “The favor is not finished.”

_I want him to feel **everything** he’s done, and I want him to think about me._

***

As he rises into consciousness, Ramsay only knows two things.

1.) He is naked.

2.) He is running for his life.

Branches and brambles reach out to grab him, snag in his hair. From behind, he can hear the barking of dogs. And a voice—his own voice—singing out to him, “Oh Ta~nsy!”


End file.
